The Street Lamps

As I mentioned in the beginning, we have light sources generated by street lamps directly. They are very important for our scene and therefore we will take a closer look at their structure.

Lamp 1

This one can be considered the main element in the composition. It is the only one which lies in the focus of the scene cam directly. Its position is the same as the model of the lamp mounted onto the wall of the right building. If you take a look at the strength you will recognise that it is set to 250% with a color range going into yellow and an area shadow which defines the surface structures around this area. We do not need a precision of 100% for the shadow parameters here. Good for the render performance.

The next step is to create the illusion of a glowing light bulb. Simply copy/paste the light object. Set the parameters to "Visible" and activate the option "No Illumination". It does not have to illuminate the scene but instead deliver the image of a glow coming from the bulb inside the lamp.

Cinema 4D provides the option to use an environment object and activate its fog function.

This is a good thing in a lot of cases, but we do not use it here. So again: copy/paste with no illumination, but this time using volumetric visibility with a soft shadow. Although it is not an active illuminating element, the shadow option influences the rays of the volumetric character.

This combination gives us more flexibility and it simulates fog at the same time. Another advantage is the better render performance in C4D (do not ask me for the reason). The strength of the light is now independent from its visibility.

The render of the lamp1 pass gives us an impression of the result (Fig.05 - 09).